Y'all know I'm a big fan of Vincent Laforet right?
The other day on Facebook, Vincent posted about being able to talk about an old commercial he shot for Apple – something for the iPad Pro launch – but they wouldn't let him (or anyone) talk about it or the production. Until now.
So I asked if it was OK to share here.
It is cool to be able to see much of what goes into an Apple promo piece. And when you think about the amount of work that Vincent and his team put in just for the background

We’re probably all waxing a bit nostalgic or thinking about the future – it happens every time the calendar ticks over – but there’s often good reason for that – we give ourselves a chance to start over and my friends Vincent Laforet and Jodie Marzett are helping by publishing some amazing stories.
Now I know you know who Vincent is but I’m sure you don’t know Jodie, but maybe you should. She’s very inspiring! But since this is a photo/video blog we’ll start with Vincent’s message for the new year, but please make sure to read Jodie’s message as

In 2013, Freefly Systems changed the game with the MoVI, the worlds most advanced handheld camera stabilization system.

Now they’re looking to do the same thing again with MIMIC, a completely new motion tracker for the MoVI Remote Operator. For those who may not be familiar, the Remote Op is the person who remotely controls the camera movement independently of where the MoVI Operator is pointing it.

As you can see from the video below, they’ve gone all out to make MIMIC completely intuitive for the operator, regardless of experience – “child’s play” indeed!

Doing away with a control joystick on the MoVI controller, Freefly have opted for a remote system with sensors that track your positioning and movement, translating these into silky smooth camera movement. This essentially allows for a totally organic, intuitive and completely immersive independent camera operation experience. I can see myself as a Director wanting to pick the control

This has been one of the purest and most exciting projects of my career – this definitely feels like a once in a lifetime experience to me.

We are currently in the middle of scheduling a series of shoots in Europe in May thanks to support from G-Technology, and you can expect as series of meetups and events in cities such as Paris, London, Barcelona and a few more – to be announced very soon.

Thanks to your pre-oder of the books, we’ve already been able to add new cities to our lists of destinations. A significant portion of every sale of each book will go towards shooting more cities!

Below you’ll find the series on Storehouse from San Francisco which was incidentally featured in The New York Times. Given that I was a staff photographer at The New York Times for 7 years, it was quite odd to be featured “in” the paper – we used to joke that our goal was to never make it into the paper, because a staffer would only make into the paper when either: a. They’d likely done something very very bad. or b. They passed away and the paper was running their obituary

This was an extremely refereshing shoot for me, as we were allowed to roam the streets of Los Angeles and to truly “chase the light” given that the shoes are of course “CGI” elements added in post (or Computer Graphics elements) created by the talented Rusty Ippolito of MakeVFX…

It was a bit of a head twister at times to direct the spot given that the team had no central characters to “follow” / focus / track but a wonderful challenge nonentheless for all involved. It’s not uncommon to work with CGI elements that everyone can reference … for example: imagine the helicopter banking to the right there, or the car turing the corner at this speed here… but when you are referencing shoes that no one else has ever seen, let alone them doing something that shoes don’t naturally do (float) … that’s where it get’s interesting. How high are they? How fast do they move? Do they wobble? Do they collide with other objects? Themselves? etc etc… It’s actually a LOT of fun. But when it comes to communicating that with several dozen people: you better have the answers. COLD.

Needless to say, this spot would have been absolutely IMPOSSIBLE without tools like Freefly’s M15 MōVI – well, OK – I guess we could have done it with a huge team / crew and street closures with Steadicams, cranes, technocrats etc… but this was not

I haven’t been able to verify this independently, but there was a recent article in Bloomberg along the same lines that forebodes very tough times ahead for Getty Images – if not its demise.

If this is true, this is major news for the photo industry and speaks to an increasingly difficult business landscape for the stock business and the photography market in general.

Some will celebrate the demise of a company that has arguably done harm to the photo industry in one way or another, but I personally have many close friends who are some of the very best photographers, editors and managers in the business, so as with any demise, I respectfully suggest there be no celebration…

A catastrophe of cataclysmic proportions for Getty Images (a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, NASDAQ: CG) is on the horizon. Below are some historical insights, and a break down of the latest Bloomberg reports on Getty. First though, here’s a very simple comparison that will illustrate the state of Getty’s bank accounts and loans:

If you owe so much money to others that you can’t even afford to pay the interest accrued on the loan, and there are no promises of large cash influxes in the near future, no one will loan you the money to pay your monthly interest expense, let alone pay down the principal you owe.

Simpler? ok try this:Assume you have a $30,000 credit card debt. The interest rate is 17%, so you are required to pay $418.89 a month – just in interest. In this example, using the numbers/income that apply to Getty’s situation, you would only have $52.36 of your income you can use to pay down your debt, thus you have NO WAY of paying off

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